October 14, 2014

A long and meaningless silence

By meeelani

Well, this was a long silence, and it was not meaningful (see link below…). I guess this blog was snowed under our academic workloads. What better time to resume it than the start of Autumn term…! To begin with, I would like to hijack a little piece that I contributed to our departmental blog, but I also have a more genuine contribution to follow immediately about Wikileaks. I realised with horror that it was nearly four years ago that I collected a number of articles capturing newspaper reactions to the publication of (parts of) US diplomatic cables enabled by Wikileaks. I had intended to do a bit of work on this, which got delayed by finishing the monograph on silence and then all other things that happened in the meantime…Ever since the blog came into being, I wanted to make a contribution out of this and now I finally managed to put together a little blog post which will follow instantly.

First of all, here is the link to the Modern Languages @ Reading University blog post in which I explain what it is in my view that makes silence meaningful:

Reading Researchers: Dr Melani Schröter on Language and Silence

About meeelani

I am a linguist and discourse analyst, specializing in political discourse, discourse key words and public discourse about language as well as silence. I have been intrigued by silence, by its communicative salience and by the question of how to get hold of it by way of linguistic analysis for some time. After having looked into silence, concealment and expectations of speech in political discourse over the last few years, I now become particularly interested in the way that the development of discourses generates absences (and in the methodological issue of how to capture these in the process!) and in silence’s peculiar relations to power and submission, hegemony and subversion. I lecture in German Studies at the University of Reading, but I use this blog in a personal capacity. View all posts by meeelani
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